John McCarthy (linguist)

John McCarthy (born 1953 in Medford, Massachusetts) has been the Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since July 2017. In July 2018, he assumed office as the Provost.[2] He previously was a linguist and professor in the Department Linguistics with a specialty in phonology and morphology. He completed his A.B. in linguistics and Near Eastern languages at Harvard College and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1979. He was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting scientist at Bell Labs before moving to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. McCarthy was responsible, along with Alan Prince, for extending autosegmental phonology, and later Optimality Theory, to morphology.